


I regret to inform you (I think we're in love)

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: the sand in your oyster [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Collective Unconscious, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Child Abuse, Dreamsharing, Dysfunctional Family, Inaccurate portrayal of MBTA commuter rail schedules, Kit is Kent's familiar, M/M, Prickly Soulmates, references to violence and vomit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 08:10:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7794031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kent tries everything he can to close the gap between him and his soulmate, but the person he ends up closer to... wasn't the person he thought it was going to be.</p><p>Which frankly throws both him <em>and</em> Dex for a loop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Paradex headcanon](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/222235) by cptnkentparson. 
  * Inspired by [Upon a Dream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6694387) by [garden of succulents (staranise)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents). 



None of the spells Kent casts give him send him any dreams about Jack. Not even when he’s sure of his technique, sure of his focus, not even when he’s worked past the nightmares that get in his way. Instead, when he dreams about his soulmate, he dreams about being angry.

There are a lot of people in the Southwest who will meet up to get high and work magic together so they can dream about their soulmates. Kent joins them more often than is good for his career or his health, except he’s convinced that if he can’t clarify the hazy images in his mind, if he can’t get a lead on the absence in his heart that’s tormenting him, he’s not going to have a career or a self to come  _back_  to.

He almost always spends days after a dream retreat in a bad mood, haunted by raised voices and slamming doors and the thought,  _I can’t wait to get out of here._  Sometimes they’re born from memories from before his dad walked out on them, or memories of the bitter years after when he was desperate for attention and approval. He recruits both a psychologist and a familiar to deal with them, because they’re intruding. It makes them quiet down, but it never brings Jack any closer.

So Kent begins to suspect that while the fishhook in his heart still has Jack’s name on it, but whatever the link is between them, it can’t be invoked in a soulmate’s name. Which drives Kent  _nuts_  because he used to be  _so sure._  Jack used to be so sure. They used to be  _so sure_  of the future they’d have together and Jack just... cut that off, like it didn’t even matter, and told Kent to move on without him like it wasn’t severing a limb. Kent would give everything he has just to hear it straight from Jack’s mouth,  _No, it isn’t you,_  just so he can be absolutely certain Jack isn’t the one for him and put the entire fucking thing to rest.

Sometimes Kent stands in the circles of people who are calling for love, invokes his soulmate, and dreams of anger so intense that he’s alive with flame even as he walks into the sea, burning fiercely underwater. He dreams a fight behind a school where he takes a hit to the jaw and he yearns, Kent yearns, to teach that dream-self boxing, to keep his hands up and deliver a right cross. To win cleanly and clearly, not to be left behind that building with a crawling sense of shame and uncertainty about whether they’ll come back, whether it’s over.

The best dreams that they share are always about hockey and Kent is almost an independent person here, almost a figure on his own, though he can’t ever see the other dreamer’s face; they play against each other, again and again, duelling up and down the ice, trying to slide the puck by or steal it away; the teams around them are ephemeral, irrelevant. When one of them scores it’s not a defeat. It’s inevitable, and intimate, like kissing in the dark, like bracing against a gust of wind you knew was coming. They play as hard as they can, every time, but losing is still the best part.

“I think, like,” one of Kent’s fellow dreamers says one morning-after, as she drags on a joint and Kent eats a breakfast burrito, ”you’re scared of anyone getting close, but when you find that somebody has, it’s a relief.”

“It’s a sexual metaphor for penetration,” another guy further down the circle says, but he says that for almost anything.

The more control that he has over his own dreams, the more fearlessly he can walk into his old memories, the more sure he is that this is someone else. He’s dreamed about himself as a separate person; as an adult he’s tried to comfort the child he once was. He’s walked in dreams behind Kit’s eyes, and on waking remembered, as though it had really happened, the time when he was eight and a cat came to him when he was crying, the way she eeled into his lap and his tears dropped onto her fur. He’s done it, and it’s healed him in ways he can’t describe, and now he thinks he’d recognize himself. This isn’t him.

He begins to think it’s his soulmate. He begins to think his soulmate needs to get the hell out. So he wakes up aching, imagining a kid just like himself, wishing he had a way to cut a more direct channel between them and say,  _Here’s my number. I have money. You don’t have to stay._

And just when he thinks that, everything changes.

The only time he’s had time to cast the dreaming magic since regular season started, the dreams were entirely different. He dreamed endlessly, so many details he was still writing them down three days later. A softer dream, full of new places and moments of unexpected sanctuary.

The only lit terminal in a computer lab in a darkened building at night, and the golden room he reaches beyond when he walks through the screen.

The little puzzles someone wants him to put together with wrench and screwdriver, that he alone knows how to solve, and the small rich candies they give him every time he triumphs.

The river he and his hockey team glide down as though the water were ice, the ducks they make friends with, and the feast at the bottom of the lake they find.

It’s also the first wholeheartedly erotic dream he can remember, in all these sessions of trying to reach his consciousness out across the lonely miles; sharp, unexpectedly vivid, sharing a bed with the person whose face he can’t see and it’s warm, comfortable, like pools of skin pouring into each other, waking up from sleeping together and moving from pleasant languor to a spark of sexual pleasure.

“Hey,” he says to Sexual Metaphor guy at breakfast, drinking burned coffee and not really expecting an answer, ”what does it mean if I dream about being penetrated?”

Which is not to say it wasn't awesome; he's being a shit because he can. It’s just.

He dreamed about Jack last night, too.

Jack, leading the hockey team down the river; Jack, making him do drills on the ice as he darted in between piles of red and golden leaves. Jack, whom he’d wanted to scream at, who  _didn’t fucking belong here._

So fuck it, he visits Zimmermann the next time he’s in the area, drives out to Samwell after a game in Boston. Jack can come back with him or not but he at least owes it to Kent to give him a fucking  _answer._

It goes badly, and Kent doesn’t even get the yes or no he’s looking for.

He stops on his way out of the house, even though he knows he’s under the streetlights, even though he knows the party guests can still see him, because he has to lean against a tree and lean over, dry-heaving, before he even gets to his car.

Frosty grass crunches underfoot behind him and one of the Samwell students says, ”Hey, are you–”

“I’m fine,” Kent says roughly, straightens up and pushes away from the tree. He gets to his car without even looking back.

He goes back to that tree later that night, asleep in his bed in Boston; he’s on his hands and knees and the cold is gone and someone puts their arms around him, rubbing his back while he vomits out bile until his stomach is empty. He’s crying, snot running out his nose, and this person is smoothing his hair away, wiping his face with a cloth, awkwardly rocking him back and forth.

He feels hollow and empty, worse in his chest than a fishhook, and this person just goes on holding him.

When he wakes up he finds himself staring at his palm, where he could have sworn there was something written. He stumbles around until his morning coffee wondering why he washed a number off his hand without writing it down first, and it’s only after coffee that he realizes he didn’t actually swap numbers with someone at Samwell. He only dreamed he did.

 _Well, dammit,_  he thinks, then resigns himself to a workout and breakfast.

Except after breakfast a number of haunting familiarity texts his phone, skeleton-bare without contact information, and the message says:  _Hey hockey guy, is this u?_


	2. Chapter 2

Dex thought he’d dreamed of his soulmate standing in the same place he’d seen Kent Parson earlier that night. He’d never dreamed that he’d actually  _have_  a mystical soul-bond with a hockey legend.

Dex doesn’t hero-worship because he knows the truth about most heroes, and mostly it just feels like the kind of thing that should happen to Ransom or Holster or someone who really  _cares_ about the cult of hockey. Dex cares about being good at hockey, but he knows it doesn’t work like osmosis. Playing near Jack Zimmermann or taking a selfie with Kent Parson doesn’t make William Poindexter any more likely to have a job after college. Playing on the  _ice_  with Zimmermann, maybe, but Dex isn’t going to get much of that while Ransom are Holster are around.

To be honest, he wouldn’t even have  _recognized_ Kent if he hadn’t met him the night before. And if he didn’t have all the selfies people took to compare with. He’d texted the number he’d dreamed about on a rash instinct, and got back:  _I am *a* hockey guy. Which one were you looking for?_

_Think I dreamed about u last nite?_

_Yeah, you probably did. Maple tree, nervous breakdown?_

Eventually he’d ended up sending a selfie and saying,  _My name is Will._  At which point he’d gotten a selfie back of a blond man raising a sardonic eyebrow and  _I’m Kent._ Which, when compared to Facebook of the night before... was, in fact,  _that_  Kent.

Kent Parson, the millennial Gretzky, who plays in Las Vegas and lives in the closet. Dex is kind of nonplussed and appalled.  _This is my soulmate? Someone who lives thousands of miles away who I can’t even date?_

But Kent had suggested meeting up since he didn’t have to leave until tonight so... here Dex is, walking side-by-side with Kent Parson along the River Quad, really awkwardly talking about hobbies and interests. "I... read a lot.” "Oh yeah, me too.” Which:  _seriously?_  Could this get any more inane? God, Dex can only imagine how pissed Parson must be, since the internet claims he’s a smoking-hot sex god who’s dated supermodels and here he is sharing dreams with a weedy ginger with big ears and no life.

“You don’t have to go back to your parents’ place,” Kent says suddenly.

Dex turns and looks at him, confused. "What?”

Kent stuffs his hands in his pockets, looking out at the river, and says, "I... know what it’s like to not always get along with your family. And to feel like you have to because you depend on them. So if you don’t want to put up with them anymore, I can make that happen. I... have money. Like, I don’t want to make you dependent on me here. The point is, you shouldn’t have to be dependent on anyone. Or put up with shit because you are.”

“They’re... My family loves me,” Dex says slowly. "They’ve given up a lot for me. They mean well. They don’t... They put up with a lot, from me.”

Kent shrugs, turns away. "Whatever. Just, you know. Offer’s open anytime.”

So Dex’s first real meeting with his soulmate isn’t actually some joyful reunion full of love and kisses. It’s awkward and ends up with someone jamming splinters in a part of his life he didn’t really register as painful until now. His family has always just been... his family. They argue a lot, but they’re not the kind of thing he’s ever thought he needed to be  _rescued_  from.

Kent says other stuff, stuff about how he’s young and he should make the most of his university experience, find a boyfriend, how Kent’s not a good prospect. "But,” Dex says, stumbling over his words. "I do want to–get to know you.”

“Okay,” Kent says. "Email me.”

He and Kent hug when they say goodbye, but they’re both so full of tension it’s brief and brisk and they’re kind of relieved to let go after.

He actually gets to know Kent over email.

It would be nice if he could do that with everybody, to be honest. Where he has time to sit and think before he has to say anything, where he can delete a sentence 20 times until it finally comes out right. And instead of worrying about people rolling their eyes or cutting him off, if he’s written too much he just scrolls up to the top and gives a tl;dr summary.

Dex is into math and programming because he’s good at it and it’ll get him a job, so it kind of surprises him that it’s the major thing he and Kent bond over. Kent turns out to be a fucking wizard when it comes to hockey statistics, and he’s been working with a Statistics professor in Wisconsin to create a more accurate system for calculating them, one that uses sophisticated data analyses because Kent is convinced half the coaches in the NHL are hung up over what Kent calls "bullshit variance”, trends that appear significant on the surface but tend not to stand up to more rigorous analysis. They’ve actually roped a bunch of Wisconsin math undergrads into watching hockey tape and recording data fresh for them. Dex gets the full backstage picture of the project, not to mention a login to the system Kent uses that he keeps partitioned from the academics because eventually the Wisconsin project data will be made accessible to the entire NHL, and Kent wants to keep the Aces’ competitive edge by having more accurate statistics than anyone else.

Kent meant it about liking to read, too. He sends Dex a lot of books, either emailed as a PDF or arriving in an Amazon package in Dex’s dorm mailbox with Kent’s name on the billing address. By March Dex is comfortable enough to write, “I am just using you as a dumping spot for my brain right now,” at the beginning of an email that, once he edits it a bit, gets an A- as an English essay. Kent actually reads  _Heart of Darkness_  and writes back to him about it and Dex uses one of his points in his midterm exam.

And then, Easter.

When he went home at Christmas Dex was definitely more  _aware_  of the tension in his house, the shouting and the slamming doors, but that was still... everybody’s family was like that, wasn’t it? Unlike Kent, his childhood doesn’t contain anything  _truly_  ugly. His family loves each other and fights a lot, and that’s just who they are. And that’s what he’d told Kent.

So he’d gone home for Easter, just the weekend, and he’d thought it would be fine. He’d thought it would be fine and his dad and his uncle got talking about politics at dinner and Dex had jumped in to correct his dad one a point, on something he knew to be  _factually untrue_ , and–

He clenches his fork in his hand as his dad shouts at him for being wrong and he clenches his fork in his hand when his father shouts at him for being stuck-up and ungrateful, spoiled by Samwell, defiant, ungrateful, and all of a sudden he thinks:  _I don’t have to put up with this._

Dex slams his fork flat on the table and gets up, his chair scraping backwards. His mother and sisters, who’d all been looking down at their plates, look up at him suddenly with alarm.

“I’m not going to sit here and get screamed at,” he says, and goes to his bedroom to pack up his laptop.

He can hear his father yelling something about, “ _You could stay here and defend yourself, you coward-_ -” before it gets too far away to hear, and if he’s going to do this he might as well do it, so he throws his clothes into his luggage and zips up his knapsack.

Katie shows up at his bedroom door, her arms wrapped around herself. "What are you doing?” she asks.

"Not staying here,” he says shortly.

She looks worried, torn between supporting Dex and not pissing Dad off. "Will, couldn’t you just–”

"Look,” he says, “I’ve got a lot of work, I’m gonna be busy with hockey all week, I wanna keep my grades up. I’m just going back to Samwell early.”

She refolds her arms anxiously. "Dad’s not gonna like that.”

Dex just shrugs.

As he’s walking the cold and blustery mile to the train station, dragging his suitcase behind him, his dad starts texting him. More of the same, with gloating about how the last train already left, limited service because it’s Easter, and a vindictively helpful offer to get in the car and come pick him up to bring him back home.

So Dex sits down outside the closed-up train station and mutes notifications from his dad. Then he calls Kent.

"Hey,” he says when Kent picks up. "So, uh–about not needing to stay at my parents’ place, did you mean that?”

"Of course,” Kent says instantly. "What do you need?”

"Well, uh.” Dex scratches his nose. "I just got into a fight with my dad, and...”

He can’t figure out what else to say. What is there  _to_  say? After a minute Kent ventures, "Okay, so… What do you need? Should I be there? Where are you?”

“I’m at the train station in Rockport,” Dex says, leaning his head back against the wall. "Where there are no trains. Because it’s Easter Sunday. So I can either spend the night here, or go back to their place.”

"No, no way, I’ll find you a hotel room,” Kent says firmly.

“I don’t think you’re gonna be–” Dex begins, but he’s cut off because there’s a little  _beep beep_  that he thinks means Kent has put him on hold.

It stays like that for ten minutes, so he puts his phone on speaker and places it on the bench next to him, leans back on his bench and tries not to pick at his cuticles. Finally Kent comes back on with, “Hey, still there?”

“Yeah,” Dex says. "Still here.”

"The hotel shuttle from the Rockport Inn and Suites is going to be by in about ten minutes,” Kent says. "Are you where he can see you?”

Dex raises his eyebrows, impressed despite himself. "Yeah,” he says, a little unsteadily. "I–thank you.”

"No problem.” Kent cuts him off. "I meant what I said.”

It’s so awkward and hard to talk, right then. He says goodbye and hangs up soon after.

When he’s been ushered into a hotel room by a welcoming chain of staff, when he’s shucked off his shoes, told Katie he’s safe but not where he is, and sat cross-legged on the bed, he finds himself texting Kent and telling him the whole story.


	3. Chapter 3

For the first six months after Jack’s overdose, Kent dreamed about him. He dreamed Zimms walking into his room, cornering him at the Starbucks, sitting down with him on a crater of the moon; Zimms taking his hand and gently, lovingly, tenderly pouring out all the reasons he’d gone away, why he’d been out of contact, why it all seemed so fucked up and how he’d worked through it, how much he loved Kent and how he never wanted anything as painful as the last few months to happen ever again.

The worst part of those dreams was that Kent woke up feeling _happy._ Immediately on waking he’d feel loose, relaxed, breathing easily and free of pain, and he’d think, _I’m so glad I have him back in my life._

Then eventually he’d start picking around the edges of the dream, _When did he get in? Did he rent his own car here? Is he staying in a hotel?_ And eventually–faster every time–he’d remember that Jack hadn’t really come back to him, he’d just dreamed it. After the first time he didn’t call Montreal to confirm that the dream wasn’t a mutual one. After the third time he’d gotten a doctor show him how to close off to shared dreaming, so he could be _sure_ it wasn’t a mutual one. It made him less crazy.

After his second trip to Samwell he starts dreaming like that again, and it makes him sick. He wakes up, that same sort of happy-loose-warm, that ghostly feeling that there should be a second body in the bed, and then his stomach clenches and turns to ice. He presses a fist to his breastbone, where acid sometimes threatens to surge back up his throat. Sometimes he scrambles up and staggers to the bathroom and leans over the toilet, waiting for vomit to come.

_Just a dream, just a dream,_ taunts him, but he has a ghost to whisper in his other ear now: _True dream. Poor fucking kid._

Poindexter– _Poindexter_ , what an awful fucking name, this kid can’t catch a single fucking break in his life, can he?–Poindexter comes across loud and clear in the dreaming, ginger hair and amber eyes and acres of freckles. Now that they’ve established the connection, Kent dreams about him almost every night. They float among stars and nebulas, get lost in computers, argue about math and continue the argument by email the next morning. In his pre-game naps Kent floats through Samwell lectures and hears Dex arguing with his liney. He carries Dex with him through hours and hours and hours of hockey; he knows the exposure is affecting him so much the Samwell coaches have commented on the improvement in Dex’s game.

Kent feels so fucking guilty. It’s his fault, him and years of dream-magic. It wouldn’t be like this if he hadn’t chased the dreaming so hard, hadn’t chased his fucking _soulmate_ so hard, hadn’t been so fucking desperate and thoughtless. He’d always... always thought it was Jack he was chasing, someone who’d ghosted on him and owed him an explanation; he hadn’t thought he was roping himself tighter and tighter to some fucking innocent _kid_.

Dex doesn’t think he’s an innocent kid. He’s an adult, he’s so fucking young he thinks eighteen is adult. He was born in a year Kent remembers, he wasn’t a virgin when they met and he thinks he is _ready for this._ Kent’s twenty-four and he... he has a lot of reasons to want to throw up in the mornings, a lot of reasons to feel guilty for what he’s done to this kid.

“You’re fucking stupid,” Dex tells him by email, in the dreaming, by text. In the flesh he’s probably a little bony under all the muscle, but in the dreams his chest is just soft, always broad enough and right there for Kent to press his face against; Dex’s fingers trace patterns in his scalp, warm beautiful circles that make Kent sigh and melt against him. “I want this. I want you.”

Kent wakes up most mornings feeling languid and loved, kissed senseless and capably cared for, feeling like there’s a warm weight keeping his back safe. And then he remembers, every morning, that he doesn’t deserve this.

He thinks he’s developing an ulcer.


End file.
